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Saturday, April 7, 2012

Rio Rita (RKO, 1929)

Rio Rita turned out to be a pretty mixed movie — a film I’ve
always been rather confused about because the original 1970 edition of Leonard
Maltin’s book Movie Comedy Teams listed
it as being in color all the way through, whereas all the other sources said
the first half was in black-and-white and the second half in color (two-strip
Technicolor). Also, there’s some uncertainty about the running time; Leslie
Halliwell lists it as being 135 minutes long, Maltin as 127 minutes, and the
version Turner Classic Movies showed was 102 minutes with the same proportions
of black-and-white to color footage as the 1930 follow-up, Dixiana (also starring Bebe Daniels in the title role,
comedians Bert Wheeler and Bob Woolsey for the comic relief and featuring a
score by composer Harry Tierney, whose art definitely falls on the operetta end
of the American musical spectrum, almost entirely devoid of syncopation or jazz
influence) — the first 70 minutes (seven reels) in black-and-white, the last
half-hour (three reels) in color. It’s also one of the best preserved samples
of two-strip Technicolor I’ve ever seen; despite the absence of blue (and even
there a lot of the women’s dresses are in the kind of bluish off-green that
two-strip costume designers and art directors used to come as close to
representing blue as the process could sustain), the colors are warm and rich,
with little of the fading to brown characteristic of Technicolor prints in
general; the flesh tones are appealing and the overall look of the two-strip
scenes is subtle and harmonious, quite a different effect from the garishness
and neon brightness associated with the later three-strip process (the look
that usually comes to mind when you utter the word “Technicolor”).

So how is Rio Rita as
a movie? I’m sorry you asked. It was the biggest-budget film of the first year
of RKO’s existence as a studio (1929), yet director Luther Reed shot it in 24
days and for a major-studio release with major stars and a large budget it’s
oddly sloppy at times. During one scene in which Bert Wheeler is doing a tap
routine (and surprisingly well, too) with a group of chorus girls, the camera
pans down to frame him and
thereby cuts the girls’ heads off at the neck. Other sequences feature odd
little twitches of the camera — it doesn’t really move, actually; it just jerks back and forth, as if the
cameraman (locked in a soundproof booth, as was the general practice of the
period) was trying his damnedest to follow the action and wasn’t all that sure
he could. Reed’s direction is
visually capable in the opening scene — in the Fremont Club night spot in a
border town in Texas (the fact that a town in Texas, which fought in the Civil
War on the side of the Confederacy, would hardly likely to be named after the
legendary California abolitionist, wartime governor of occupied Missouri and
first Republican Party Presidential nominee John C. Frémont didn’t seem to
occur to anybody associated with this film) — in which he pans around the club
and discovers two striking-looking people (striking because they’re both
wearing Mexican serapés and look
almost alike in their costumes), one of whom is the film’s hero, John Boles,
and the other is supposed to be the heroine’s brother. The brother and the heroine — the title character,
played by Bebe Daniels — live together at the Rio Rita Ranch across the border
into Mexico, and the heroine (who for some strange reason bears the full name
Rita Ferguson even though she’s represented as a Mexican and speaks all her
lines with a thick — and patently fake — Spanish accent) is being amorously
chased by an exiled Russian general who owns a gambling ship anchored on the
Mexican side of the Rio Grande (where it’s perfectly legal).

It turns out Our Hero is actually a Texas Ranger working
undercover to find the whereabouts of a mysterious bandit called “El Kinkajou,”
and both he and Our Heroine suspect the brother of being “El Kinkajou,” but in
the end it turns out that the nasty Russian general (Georges Renevant), who has
the brother kidnapped midway through the story for reasons that never become
quite clear, is the real “El Kinkajou”
(well, he had to do something to
support himself in the style to which he had become accustomed once he was
driven out of Russia by the Revolution) and the brother is a secret agent of the
Mexican police. Rio
Rita was produced on the stage by Florenz
Ziegfeld, and it shows in the elaborate pageantry and the rather static
tableaux (particularly at the end, when all the cast members — Daniels and
Boles, Wheeler and Dorothy Lee, and Woolsey with whoever the actress was who
was playing Wheeler’s ex-wife — are appropriately paired off and everyone in
the screen turns their back to the camera so their costumes can billow out picturesquely), though co-scenarists
Reed and Russell Mack do deserve credit for “opening out” the piece. Much of
the Western action takes place outdoors, and though the locations are familiar
from thousands of RKO “oaters” at least they get us out of the stuffy interiors
into which most musical films in the early days were kept well locked — and
most, if not all, of the musical numbers were clearly pre-recorded and
post-synchronized in the technique that would become the standard way of making
musicals but was still unusual in 1929. (Interestingly, it’s not at all clear when this story is supposed to be taking place; the
Fremont Club in the opening scene has a neon-lit sign and the streets of the
town have streetlights, but there are no automobiles or telephones. When MGM
remade Rio Rita in 1942 — with
Kathryn Grayson and John Carroll in the leads and Abbott and Costello in the
Wheeler and Woolsey roles — they made it definitely a story of the World War II
present and made the Kinkajou a leader of a gang of saboteurs.) And Tierney’s
score, though very much of its
time, at least has a lovely title song to carry it and decent, if not
spectacular (and not always that well-recorded), voices to carry it. Mood-wise,
Rio Rita is not all that
different from Whoopee (another
Ziegfeld stage success filmed a year later), though with the comedy a relief
from an excruciatingly dull plot (instead of, as in Whoopee, the dull plot only marking time between Eddie
Cantor’s dazzling comedy routines), and with far less experimentation in
staging the dances (though dance director Pearl Eaton did include one overhead shot, in which the chorus girls
in Wheeler’s tap number lie on the floor as he does a runaround and jumps over
them). — 1/14/98

•••••

I finally got to Charles’ place at 2:30 or so and we watched
the rest of the 1929 Rio Rita (which
we’d stopped watching the night before at the point where it shifts from
black-and-white to two-strip Technicolor) and all of the 1942 version of Rio
Rita with Abbott and Costello (top-billed
this time, not supporting players as Wheeler and Woolsey had been in the 1929
version) and Kathryn Grayson and John Carroll in the romantic leads. Charles
found the two-strip in the 1929 version disappointing — it was mostly greens
and oranges (the costume designer apparently favored these colors since the
two-strip process handled them especially well) — though the film itself holds
up fairly well as entertainment, even though Wheeler and Woolsey steal it right
out from under the romantic leads. At least John Boles has a pleasant
personality and a nice tenor voice — and since he’s playing a gringo (the head of the local company of Texas Rangers, who
are chasing after the notorious bandit “The Kinkajou”), he doesn’t have to
affect a Mexican accent. The rest of the cast members seemed to have differing
notions of what constituted an appropriate Mexican accent — Bebe Daniels loses
hers completely when she has her biggest emotional scene in the film (when she
has to react to the — false, fortunately — report that John Boles has been
killed) — though aside from her silly catch-as-catch-can accent (how a Mexican
girl got the last name “Ferguson” is never quite explained in this film), her
acting is actually quite good. (She proved in the next few years — notably in
the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and the 1932 film Silver Dollar — that she actually could
act very well, especially in parts that allowed her to be both sexy and
dramatic.) But Wheeler and Woolsey have the most marvelous parts of the film to
themselves, particularly an audacious scene in which they’re ostensibly
courting women (Wheeler is courting Dorothy Lee, their frequent vis-a-vis who
had an annoyingly squeaky speaking voice but a less offensive, if still
childish, singing voice — after all, she was only 17 when she made this film! — and Woolsey is
courting the wife Wheeler is trying to get rid of to marry Dorothy Lee) but
actually give each other love-slaps and end up in each other’s arms! — 4/12/98

•••••

Last night, after we’d just seen the 1942 version of Rio
Rita, I dug out the 1929 version and ran it
for comparison. The best thing I can think of about this rather stilted musical
is that it was based on a 1927 mega-hit produced on Broadway by Florenz
Ziegfeld, and while the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Bob Woolsey were the
only members of the stage cast who carried over to the film, watching this
movie is as close as anyone who was born after Ziegfeld’s death in 1932 is
going to get to the experience of watching a Ziegfeld musical on stage. The
film was planned as the first release of the newly formed RKO studio (the
result of a merger negotiated between RCA, the Radio Corporation of America,
and its founder and CEO David Sarnoff; and a tiny studio called Film Booking
Office, or FBO, headed by Joseph P. Kennedy — yes, the father of those Kennedys), and though production delays meant that a
much simpler and cheaper film, Syncopation, was actually RKO’s first release, Rio Rita was the studio’s first blockbuster hit. In its
original release it actually ran 140 minutes, though only a shortened
105-minute version survives, and the first seven reels we have are in
black-and-white while the last three are in two-strip Technicolor. (We’ve seen
better examples of the two-strip process but this film is quite well preserved,
and the salmon-and-turquoise color scheme of two-strip is absolutely lovely,
painterly and elegant, a far cry from the shrieking hues of the three-strip
process that replaced it in the early 1930’s.)

John Kobal’s history of movie
musicals, Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance!,
has a charming account of the making of Rio Rita from Bebe Daniels, who played the title role — Rita
Ferguson, a Mexican (named Ferguson? Were we supposed to believe she was the mixed-race
daughter of an Anglo father and a Mexican mother?) who runs an inn on the
Texas-Mexico border and is smitten by the Texas Ranger, Jimmy Stewart (John
Boles), who’s there to catch the notorious bandit “El Kinkajou” — who had been
under contract to Paramount in the silent era and had been let go by them
because they just assumed, without bothering to give her a sound test, that she
wouldn’t have a voice suitable for sound films. “When the film was such a
smash, [Paramount chairman] Adolph Zukor, who had always been a friend, wanted
to find out why I had been let go by Paramount, and Ben Schulberg [Paramount’s
production chief and father of author Budd Schulberg] said it was because I
couldn’t talk,” Daniels told Kobal. “So Zukor wanted to see the test they told
him I had made, but he never saw it, because there wasn’t one. They had never
bothered to test my voice. They just panicked and let a lot of us go. Richard
Dix also came to RKO, where he made Cimarron [another blockbuster hit and the only Academy Award
Best Picture RKO ever produced]. There’s a nice ending to the story. Some time
later I ran into Ben Schulberg, and he said, ‘You didn’t tell me you could
sing.’ And I said, ‘My mother always told us to wait until we were asked.’”

Rio
Rita is a pretty good example of the sort
of “number” musical that was the staple of Broadway in the 1920’s, in which a
scene that gives us exposition to follow the plot (such as it is) is followed
by a romantic scene between the leads, which is followed by a song, which is
followed by a comedy scene (and sometimes a comedy song), and so on until the various plot threads are
wrapped up and the film is ready to end — which it does in one of those classic
tableaux Ziegfeld was famous for in which, after all the leads are paired off
appropriately (Daniels with Boles, Wheeler with his usual vis-à-vis Dorothy Lee — who had a nastily chirping speaking
voice but wasn’t half-bad as a singer — and Woolsey, who plays the lawyer who
arranged Wheeler’s divorce from his first wife so he could marry Lee, with
Helen Kaiser, Wheeler’s ex-wife), everybody in the frame turns their
back to the camera so we can see their
costumes billow out spectacularly as the film fades out and RKO’s end title
comes up. The plot of the film isn’t much: Rita is worried that her brother
Roberto Ferguson (Don Alvarado) is the Kinkajou, and she gets upset with Jimmy
when she decides that the only reason he’s been romancing her is to get close
enough to her so he can arrest her brother. So she accepts the marriage
proposal of General Ravenoff (Georges Renavent), a Russian expat who fled the
Revolution and established himself as the political boss of that part of
Mexico, who wants to marry her on the “pirate boat” he’s converted to a
floating nightclub on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. To absolutely no
one’s surprise (no one in the audience, anyway), General Ravenoff is himself
the Kinkajou, and Jimmy cuts the moorings of the “pirate boat” so it drifts off
to the U.S. side of the river — only Rita’s brother Roberto (ya remember Roberto?) turns out to be an agent of the Mexican police and demands custody of the prisoner for the
crimes he’s committed in Mexico.

But Harry Tierney’s songs are gorgeous if you
can accept the rather stiff operetta style in which they’re written, Bebe
Daniels’ voice is acceptable but not great (though her speaking voice, with her
inept attempt at a Mexican accent, is almost as risible as John Carroll’s in
the remake), and John Boles’ rather stentorian tenor is great and absolutely right for the songs (with two
other singers to compare him to — J. Harold Murray, who created the part on
stage and recorded “Rio Rita” and “Song of the Rangers” as part of a Victor
Records medley of the score; and John Carroll, singing those two Tierney songs
in the 1942 remake — Boles soars above both of them). Daniels had a quirky
career afterwards; RKO gave her another film very much like Rio Rita — Dixiana, set in ante-bellum New Orleans, also with a Harry Tierney score, also
with Wheeler and Woolsey and also with a finale in two-strip Technicolor
(featuring the great African-American dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in his
first film, and only film in
color) — but the leading man wasn’t of John Boles’ caliber and the audiences
weren’t interested in it the second time around. She suggested reteaming her
and Boles in a film of Carmen,
RKO said no, and Daniels left for Warner Bros. — where she made her two best
(non-musical) sound films, the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and the 1932 film Silver Dollar — before she married actor Ben Lyon and returned
with him to his native country, Great Britain. The 1929 Rio Rita is a pretty stiff film, and it’s slow going at times
(while the cuts that were made to produce the shorter version that’s the only
one that survives are jarringly obvious in places), but it’s entertaining
enough that one can see how this sort of spectacle wowed ’em on stage in the
1920’s. — 4/7/12